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January 16, 2013

RIIA Launches Virtual Learning Center for Advisors, Home Office

Learning center expands on monthly webinar series

The Retirement Income Industry Association is building on its webinar series to develop a virtual learning center for advisors and home office personnel, the organization announced on Jan. 8.

The learning center will include archives of RIIA lectures and web presentations that focus on retirement income research, products and strategies.

The learning center is an expansion of the monthly webinar series that RIIA has been running since 2010, Kim McSheridan, a consultant for RIIA on the learning center, told AdvisorOne on Tuesday. That series had such a successful response that the organization decided to split the focus in two directions: “to continue to focus on what would be helpful to home office personnel, institutions, the people who are building, marketing, administering and selling these solutions.” Additionally, the organization would add to that a focus on advisors, the people McSheridan said are “recognizing that retirement planning has potential for them and whose clients are asking about it.”

The learning center will provide a place for RIIA members and nonmembers, and potentially the public, to find “neutral, topical online resources.” The learning center will also serve as an archive so users can look at it on their own time, McSheridan said.

The learning center is being built by volunteers, so McSheridan expects it to be fully implemented over a long timeline, about two to three years.

The content comes from individuals, either members of RIIA or not, “with timely work that we can bring into the appropriate track,” McSheridan said. For example, the first webinar of the new learning center featured Dana Anspach, principal of Sensible Money, an RIA firm in Scottsdale, Ari, who discussed case studies and best practices for retirement planning.

McSheridan noted that the learning center is an attempt to “work across silos” rather than focusing on one small part of the industry. “RIIA is not committed to one solution,” McSheridan said. “Individual clients have individual needs, and we have to match clients with the right solution.”

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